Talk:The Priestess Warrior and the Mithril Giants/@comment-93.177.176.211-20170705134328/@comment-30176423-20170707204951
@Lzlis "I haven't seen anyone present any compelling evidence of hidden variable effects on drops" Well, this is not quite true. I got plenty of evidences with just my account alone. Here is one of the examples. The point is that sometimes we get a streak of much higher than normal drop rate during time limited events. Something like 30% drop rate instead of expected 10%. Or 90% instead of 50%. And whenever this happens, such streak continues in subsequent runs if we avoid doing any changes. So how do we process such data data? First of all, whenever we suspect a streak of very good drops, we have to discard data from earlier runs and start collecting statistics from scratch. In my case of Momiji farming, I got the first 2 drops in the first 4 runs. This initial data has to be discarded, and we have to only look at what happens next. Under the standard model, the drop rate is supposed to be low (let's say 10% for the sake of simplicity). But I got 4 drops in the next 14 runs. The probability of having 4 or more drops after 14 runs (with 10% theoretical drop rate in each run) is around 4.4%. Our p-value is the theoretical probability of observing this many or more drops. And one more thing, we have to pick some significance level even before starting this experiment. Usually 95% is a popular choice, but I would prefer to use 90% because we usually don't have too many samples during events. I have done such test not once, but multiple times. The key part is to pick the right moment for doing such a statistical test. Because most of the time, the drop rate does not differ from the global average too much. And if you do it arbitrarily, then you will be sure to get something similar to https://xkcd.com/882 If you get two uncommon drops in the first few runs after starting farming on a new map, then it's a good idea to do a statistical test for the subsequent runs on this particular map. And of course, don't introduce any changes to your setup and don't move to any other map even temporarily while doing this experiment. Minimizing any changes between runs is the strict requirement. "Ssvb may disagree saying that people's constant reports of anomalies on event page discussions constitutes evidence, but at the very least, any such evidence is difficult to quantify, and the discussion has been done to death already." I don't rely on the reports from others because I have more than enough data from my own runs. I'm just pointing out that I'm not the only one who has observed long streaks of abnormal drop rate. "Another argument is that certain hidden variables may be possible for the player to manipulate. The develops would have an active incentive to avoid implementing such a method in order to prevent players from exploiting it." I don't know how to change the drop rate to more favorable. I can only make a good use of it if this happens naturally by itself. Why would the developers worry too much about it? In the best case I only get double or triple drop rate for something for a relatively short period of time. And there are almost always some tradeoffs. For example, if I get a good drop rate for a platinum armor on some map, then it may be bad for farming the event unit. In fact I suspect that this might have been done intentionally, for the sake of making the event outcome less predictable. A proper binomial distribution does not have much variety. "Suggesting that people change their farming strategy isn't harmless (granted, it's just a game, but it matters insofar as anything in the game matters). If the simple model is correct, then people switching to a worse map will have a worse result." Come on. Temporarily switching to some other map with slightly worse global average drop rate would not affect the results too much. People could also try some story maps to spend a bit of excess Charisma.